All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (26 page)

I want you to love me.

I want you to be my wife.

I want you to be the mother of my children.

I want you to be satisfied with our life together.

Did I love my father, tyrannical, charming, manipulative, utterly and completely selfish? Oh, yes. I was my mother’s daughter. No matter what he did, I feared him, I adored him.

Did I love Richard, handsome, intelligent, courteous, the answer to a maiden’s prayer? No. I was my father’s daughter. Most of the time, I just wanted to smash his face in.

Chapter 10: Blood Between Us, Love

SHE’D SAID THAT SHE NEVER wanted to see him again.

And how often had she told Meg to be careful what she asked for?

~•~

Monday saw Laura moved into Edwards Lake. Her clothes were stored in the armoire, her linens put away in a lovely cedar-lined closet, her Kurzweil and laptop plugged in, her music set out on the piano. Tuesday, she had one expected delivery – Max, her cat, whose indignation at his flight from Texas she assuaged with generous helpings of tuna – and one unexpected delivery – a bouquet of daisies and baby’s breath left at her back door
. Can’t wait to meet you, Aunt Laura! You’re the best! Love, Julie.
Wednesday, she welcomed two expected guests, Lucy and Tom, for dinner – and one unexpected guest, Diana, who showed up in time for dessert.

“The club can spare me for an hour,” Diana said defensively to Lucy’s pointed look.

Dinner might have been fun, if only Diana hadn’t morosely withdrawn into herself. Laura kept no liquor on hand, so Diana substituted numerous trips to the powder room and kept quiet the rest of the time. If she seemed subdued, Laura thought, it was because Tom Maitland had very little use for her, and she knew it.

Laura liked Tom on sight. He hadn’t the charm Cam had turned on and off at will, and next to Richard he suffered both in height and devastating good looks. He looked what he was – a lawyer sliding towards forty, a middle-of-the-road citizen with sandy hair, conservative clothing, and a kind manner. Kind above all. He didn’t wait for Lucy to perform introductions; he came towards Laura, took her in his arms, and kissed her cheek. “Welcome home, Laura. You’ve been missed.” Then a grin. “Can I have your autograph?”

“As many as you want.”

Tom adored Lucy. How nice to see after eight years of marriage, Laura thought wistfully, watching him reach for his wife’s hand. She and Cam had
never
looked so at each other, had never talked and touched and so eagerly bonded together. Not for Lucy and Tom, the long awkward silences at dinner, the welcome relief of the phone ringing or a child’s intrusion. Lucky Lucy. She’d found a man to laugh with.

“Now about the benefit,” Lucy interrupted her thoughts, and enthusiastically dug into her mint chocolate chip ice cream as if she hadn’t spent the day laid out by morning sickness.

“Okay.” Lucy didn’t want her just to write a check; her sister wanted her to actually invest herself, to atone for the fourteen years of silence. “I’ll do it.”

“Great,” said Lucy. “Let’s start making plans. How long are you here for?”

They settled on a date a week before Laura’s expected return to London to prepare for the tour (“Maybe if I’m really good,” said Lucy, “I’ll still fit into my evening clothes,” and Tom pretended to miss the disgusted look Diana roused herself enough to send his way). Laura handed her a proposed playlist, as close to the tour program as she could legally get, and offered to polish up a new song for a world premiere. They discussed financing, publicity, logistics – matters Cat Courtney never dealt with herself – and, as they talked, Laura noticed that Diana’s interest slipped away by the minute.

“Do you still want to do this?” she finally asked her sister.

“What?” Diana woke up. “Oh, sure. Just get me the music so I can start work.”

Less than a whole-hearted endorsement, but Diana didn’t seem prepared to offer more. Laura gave them her standard contract; she wanted protection against the vagaries of an owner whose mood depended on the contents of a bottle and her ubiquitous handkerchief. Maybe Diana divined her reasoning, for she insisted on writing her accompaniment into the contract, and Lucy said, “Good. Now you can’t bail out of this.”

Whether she meant Diana or Laura, she didn’t specify.

By the time the evening wrapped up, Lucy and Tom had hammered out a proposal to submit to Laura’s manager, Diana had made two more trips to the powder room that had cheered her up considerably but induced another attack of the sniffles, and Laura felt torn between fury and fear of what she would find once they left.

Diana came to life only at the door, with a shriek. “What’s that?”

“That” weighed fourteen pounds and was waving the plumed tail he was so proud of. Laura laughed and scooped him up. “This is Max, my best friend and soul mate. Max, meet family.”

But Diana was backing away, real panic in her face. “My God, it’s a cat.”

Out of some recess of her mind came a picture: Diana, stranded on a chair, hysterically crying, while below her a wide-eyed calico sat and washed its paws. “Oh, Di, I’m sorry, I forgot. Here, Lucy, take him—”

Diana was wheezing now, hyperventilating, eyes fixed on Max in fear, even as Lucy bundled the miscreant, over vociferous protests, into the drawing room. Laura ignored Tom rolling his eyes and drew Diana out onto the veranda. “Come on, Di, he’s in the house, he can’t get to you—”

She spent a lot of time nursing her sisters, she thought, even as she smoothed Diana’s damp forehead and patted her back.

Her words must have penetrated Diana’s haze, for her sister came to herself once she realized they were outside, that a solid oak door stood between her and Max. Her gasps slowed down. “I’m sorry,” she managed between hard breaths. “Of course you have a cat. I know it’s stupid—”

“Not everyone likes cats,” Laura said soothingly. “It’s all right.”

A trace of moonlight glimmered through the trees and washed out the lines of fear. With her breathing returning to normal, Diana looked more alert than she had all evening. “Julie will like him. She loves animals.”

Had she screamed out an obscenity, she couldn’t have startled Laura more, and she saw it. A measuring look came into her eyes. “Haven’t you met Julie yet? Lucy said you’d talked to Richard.”

“No,” said Laura, thinking rapidly. She sensed danger in admitting to that evening with Richard; she wanted to head Diana off as quickly as possible. “I called over there, and no one answered.”

“Oh, they’re not there. Richard’s out of town.” They turned around at Lucy’s voice from the open door. “Julie’s staying with the McIntires until he gets back.”

“Why isn’t she with you?” Diana said sharply.

“She has a cold. I couldn’t afford the risk at this stage.”

So no use looking for him, no use hoping that he would turn up at the door. At the moment, Laura would have liked him to materialize, so that he could look into Diana’s devastated eyes and see the damage he and Julie had done.

She said flatly, “Why isn’t she with
you
, Di?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lucy frown and shake her head.

“Oh, God forbid!” Diana showed surprising animation. “I might corrupt her – I’m certainly not the parent Mr. God Almighty Perfect Ashmore is. Just ask him! My God, she’s sixteen, what does he think I’ll do to her—”

“Di,” Lucy’s voice cut right through her words. “Come on now, we’ve been over this time after time. Laurie, don’t start anything with her. She knows better. Richard’s within his rights, and the courts back him up. Until you straighten up,” she punctuated her words with a sharp glance at Diana’s handkerchief, “he’s not going to change his mind.”

So Richard and Diana had already been to court. But, of course, she remembered Lucy talking about a long-ago custody battle.
My God, it was bloody! I never saw anything as vicious….

Diana said bitterly, “Julie is nowhere near as innocent as everyone thinks. And she needs her mother. Oh, I know,” she gestured towards Lucy, “you do everything you can, Luce, but you’ve got your own baby to think about now. Richard can’t rely on you to mother Julie forever. Honestly, what does he think I’ll do, hand her a bottle of Scotch and tell her bottoms up?”

So Diana understood her own terrible problems. Laura thought of asking if she might expose Julie to the fine white grains that no doubt now decorated the downstairs powder room, and then stopped before she could voice the thought. She saw the bravado on Diana’s face; she heard the tremor in her voice that admitted that she did not stand on the moral high ground that she would have preferred. She saw, too, the desolate chill in Diana’s eyes; she heard the real grief underlying her words.

How much had Diana’s loneliness, child of Richard’s separation of mother from daughter, brought her to this sorry pass?

“How long has it been since – no,” Laura held up her hand as she saw Lucy open her mouth. “No, Lucy, I want to know. Di, when did you last see Julie?”

“Oh, God.” Diana thought. “Christmas, maybe?”

And they stood now in the middle of June. Almost six months. She thought of going six months, six weeks, without seeing Meg. She wasn’t doing well after little more than six days.

“Do you really want to see her, Di? I mean, for her sake, not just for yours?”

“Laurie.” Lucy sounded pained. “Don’t push this. You don’t want to get involved, believe me. This isn’t a good thing to get in the middle of.”

She ignored that. “Di?”

But Diana had drifted out of hearing.

Surely Diana could stay on the straight and narrow long enough to keep her daughter for a few days. And if Julie herself balked – well, Richard must know that no teenage girl was mature enough to realize how much, someday, she would regret spurning her mother.

Cam would have torn me apart if I ever kept Meg from him.

She looked at Diana, fumbling for her keys in the moonlight, and she said softly, “You’ll see your daughter, Di. I’ll make sure of that.”

~•~

Tom Maitland showed his steel the next day.

“I’m sorry to bring this up,” he said, after a few preliminary thank-yous for dinner. “I overheard you talking to Diana last night. Laura, you need to stay out of this.”

She’d had the night to rethink her words. It had struck her that, if Cam had indulged in recreational drugs instead of recreational women, she would not have been generous in sharing custody. As Lucy had said, Richard was well within his rights; he’d no doubt resent her interference, and rightly so.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” she apologized. “I know it’s none of my business—”

“No,” and she understood then what made Tom Maitland a fine lawyer. “It’s not. I know you’re new back in the family, and I realize you don’t understand what’s been going on. I’ll tell you now, and I expect you to do as I tell you. Don’t interfere in this. Richard will cut you to ribbons, and he’ll have my wholehearted support. Diana is trying to provoke a fight with him, and she is using Julie because she knows damn well that Julie is the most precious thing in the world to him and he’ll do anything and make any concessions to keep her safe.”

No one had spoken to Cat Courtney like that in years, and Laura St. Bride knew perfectly well she deserved it. She said softly, “I understand, Tom. I have a daughter of my own.”

“I know you do.” Tom was unrelenting. “Be very clear on one thing, Laura. You’re important to us, but Richard and Julie are family, and you’re an outsider. This family will survive this only if we mind our own business.”

Laura was grateful that he couldn’t see the burning in her cheeks. “Okay.”

“Good.” Tom obviously had no intention of letting up on her. “I like you, Laura. I always thought I would, from hearing about you all these years, and I’m happy to see you home—”

“Thank you—”

“But get in the way of my client,” said Tom relentlessly, “and – fair warning – I’ll mow you down. I may be your brother-in-law, but I am also Richard Ashmore’s lawyer, and my client comes first.”

She couldn’t wait to hang up.

~•~

Laura spent the rest of the week alone, exploring her new home, switching bedrooms after one night in an exceedingly uncomfortable horsehair bed. Lucy took her to lunch Thursday to show her off to a client who had agreed to underwrite the concert, and Diana called once just to chat. Neither of them mentioned Julie.

She loved being alone, but Meg’s absence left a hole in her heart.

The loneliness of not being part of Meg’s everyday life hit worst in the evenings. She had never felt so emotionally severed from her daughter. Even the nightly calls didn’t diminish her sense of isolation. Meg belonged to Laura St. Bride, and more and more Laura St. Bride was vanishing into the past, more and more Laura Abbott became the present.

Her sense of distance didn’t carry over the line. Meg chattered on as she always had, supremely confident that her mother wanted to know every detail of every day. She did, she did, and she didn’t even mind that the price to pay for sharing Meg’s day long distance lay in Mark’s attempts, even now, to help her run her life. He quizzed her mercilessly. What security did she have at Edwards Lake, what was she thinking, doing a benefit concert while she was supposed to be on vacation, had she seen
that man
yet?

She lied.

Edwards Lake was a showcase. Even the virtual tour on the web site had not shown the full beauty of the polished Chippendale staircase, the etched glass half-lights over the doors, the soft lushness of the bedroom she finally chose. She found Richard’s restoration notes in the house guidebook and saw his touch in every corner. Absent he might be, but his work surrounded her. When Mark asked the inevitable question, she considered telling him:
I live in a house he restored, I sleep in a sensuous bedroom he calls his favorite, I cook in a replica of the kitchen at Ashmore Magna, where Peggy taught me to make cookies for him. And he lives only four miles from me. He haunts me, just as Cam always feared he did. But, no, I haven’t seen him since last week. Satisfied?